> And the debian KDE team has clearly announced that
> they won't provide upgradability from anything else than KDE 2.2, so there
> you have it.
Well, one of debian's strengths is its upgrades - when you move from
woody to sarge with a glibc transition, a gcc and C++ abi transition,
a KDE 2->3 transition and god knows what else, you can just do an
ordinary package upgrade and the whole thing is more or less seamless.
One of the drawbacks of this is that transitions, as they happen in sid,
take time. Certainly more time than they might for other distributions.
Yes, KDE has taken too long to enter sid. In the meantime there have
been unofficial KDE3 packages floating about. Unofficial because
they're *not* on the debian servers, because either the packaging was
unfinished, or because putting them on the debian servers at the time
would lead to upgrade problems (e.g., waiting for the gcc-3.2
transition), or even because some of the unofficial package sets were
forked from what the official maintainers were doing, thus even further
increasing the possibility of upgrade problems.
Which is why we've been saying from the beginning that if you're running
unofficial KDE3 packages, you can expect to have to uninstall all of KDE
before switching to whatever is finally going into sid. No unpleasant
surprises.
This is not meant to be an affront to any of the people who've provided
unofficial packages; a lot of people have appreciated your work. Just
please don't complain when we don't provide a smooth upgrade path,
particularly from a non-trivially forked package set. :)
And yes, some effort *has* been done to reduce at least some of the
nastier problems that can surface when upgrading from some of the
unofficial packages, e.g., the thread earlier this week on epochs.
Ben. :)